If you're going to go down that route, you really need to start separating public administration from political decisions, and you need a really good metric for figuring out what things are objectively good for society, and to what degree that's the case. That's a good deal harder to do in practice than democracy, and moreover you need people to staff it who're honest. Yeah, I know that last one's the common complaint lobbed at every system in history, but the fact is that history has shown that we, as a species, really benefit from having a mechanism to remove from power somebody who's abused it, and democracy at least provides that. Any system that's recognizably an aristocracy and definitely not a democracy would, by definition, lack such a mechanism (at least, outside the hands of other aristocrats, which is dangerous for pretty obvious psychological reasons).
Here's the biggest stumbling block for this sort of thing, though. For the vast majority of political decisions, there simply isn't adequate data to make a rational, objectively-backed-up decision. In the absence of an objective Right Answer, the best criterion I've heard of for political decisions is "What the people subject to that decision want done". It may not be a great rule, but it's better than the whims of somebody with the power to make law (who, by all my experience, are ill-equipped to understand the implications of it for their subjects). And if that's your best answer, then elections as they're intended to work test exactly the qualification you're looking for - "Is willing to make decisions on behalf of the electorate, instead of on behalf of self". Now, obviously the United States, as it stands, fails at this, but it's for very, very different reasons.
Realistically, though, by the time you extricate inheritance (which you'd obviously have to do), come up with a coherent strategy for evaluating what is or is not good for every possible political decision, implement an objective monitoring system to ensure the aristocrats apply that standard, and so on, what you wind up with isn't something that really resembles any aristocracy that's ever existed. At this point, I'd say hand the administration over to AIs - we're closer to developing ones that could handle it than we are to developing a human system (and humans to run it) that would implement these ideas without encrusting the current degree of corruption with a layer of superficial legitimacy.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3765667 times)